Once a job crafter, always a job crafter? Investigating job crafting in organizations as a reciprocal self-concordant process across time

Research depicts job crafting as a desirable, ongoing employee behavior rather than a one-off event. However, insights are lacking into how employees’ active engagement in job crafting may be sustained across time. In this study, we advance a dynamic framework of how changes that follow employees’ periods of job crafting may, in turn, motivate versus impede continued crafting of one’s job role over time. Drawing from self-concordance theorizing, we propose and test a framework on how job crafting and employees’ attainment of self-concordant and organizational work goals are reciprocally related over time. Longitudinal data from a large, three-wave study collected over four years among church ministers support a positive reciprocal relationship between job crafting and self-concordant goal attainment, as well as an indirect positive relationship between job crafting and organizational goal attainment via self-concordant goal attainment. However, in line with our theorizing, organizational goal attainment did not predict subsequent job crafting. Instead, high organizational goal attainment weakened the extent to which job crafting at one time point positively related to job crafting at the next time point. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings for employees’ continued engagement in job crafting in organizations.